#ncga: Jeff Tarte, down with The Struggle.

We came across a recent episode of a Facebook podcast called “The Millennial Voice.”  It featured state senator Jeff Tarte answering rather vapid questions from a rather bright-eyed, bushy-tailed millennial Charlottean.

I had to pause the video and perform multiple eye-rolls and face-palms in response to this question from the host: “How can we ensure there is a place to live for everyone in our community?”

Instead of taking the conservative route — lecturing the young man on how cutting local regulations and taxes can make housing more affordable — Tarte, allegedly a Republican, decides to go full-Bill Barber:

[…] “With some of our older historical African-American communities, we’ve got an issue of gentrification which deals with affordable housing but it’s also pushing families out of their neighborhoods for these big developments.  And we’re losing the history behind some of those families who have been here for literally in  some cases centuries.  And we need to have a transition ability to address that. We’re working with leadership in the county and the city locally,in Charlotte, and Mecklenburg County. We’re working with the people from Goodwill. We’re working with some of the neighborhood leaders in some of the older African-American neighborhoods that we don’t want to have gentrified and basically have disappear.[…]”

There he is — the whitest white man I’ve ever seen — making The Round Rev proud.

He’s talking about keeping those neighborhoods, established during segregation, intact.  White folks over here.  Black folks over there.  (I thought we dealt with this in the 60s and 70s.)

When liberals talk about “gentrification”, they are talking about people moving into the neighborhood who are different from the people already there. They don’t like that kind of thing — UNLESS it is being done to those church-going, gun-toting, Republican-voting, truck-driving white people. 

Imagine a white politician railing about protecting the sanctity of traditionally white neighborhoods from an invasion of minority newcomers. Exactly. 

This is not about assimilation.   This is not about Making America Great Again.  It’s racial identity politics. It’s also a whole lot of big government meddling into property rights.   (For Tarte, I’m sure he’s trying to create a distraction in order to kibosh any ideas about those folks moving into HIS neighborhood.)